The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that, for now, President Trump may remove President Biden’s three appointees to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) without cause. This temporary decision, reported by NPR, weakens a nearly century-old precedent designed to preserve the independence of regulatory agencies by limiting presidential removal powers.

The Court’s order referenced similarities to a prior case involving the National Labor Relations Board, emphasizing that the CPSC exercises executive power in a comparable way. Justice Brett Kavan augh noted he would have preferred the Court take up the case in full this fall. The Court’s three liberal justices—Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented, criticizing the use of the emergency docket to shift power away from Congress and toward the Executive Branch.

Justice Kagan warned that the ruling undermines Congress’s authority to structure independent agencies, writing that the Court acted “with little time, scant briefing, and no argument” to override legislative protections. She cautioned that such actions could gradually transfer governing power from Congress to the president.

This ruling challenges Humphrey’s Executor, a landmark 1935 Supreme Court case that limited a president’s authority to remove officials from independent agencies without cause. That decision arose when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to dismiss a Federal Trade Commission official for policy disagreements and was blocked by the Court.
Biden’s commissioners, appointed in 2021, filed suit after Trump moved to remove them before their terms expired. A federal judge initially reinstated them, but the Fourth Circuit declined further action. The Supreme Court has now sided with the Trump administration but declined to fast-track a full review, leaving the broader constitutional question unresolved for now.